Tags for this video have been changed from 'food, sustainability, agriculture' to 'food, sustainability, agriculture, oil, fossil fuels, depletion, the oil we eat' - edited by calvados

The biggest hurt on creating a commodities based market with regards to agriculture in Africa is the unfair trade factors working against farmers in Africa, and dumping of surplus agricultural products, every time a famine or drought strikes the region the developed world throw undue amounts of food aid into the nation (USAID).

While this is of course necessary for the short term, this doesn't translate into a long term strategy to develop and or recover an agricultural market in the region, farmers thus go back to grow to self sustain only. What happens is that the aid becomes a commodity in itself, how could a struggling agricultural market compete against something basically offered for free? This is due to the fact that aid resides for far longer, there have been countless reports of aid being ceased and then resold by unscrupulous people who pick up aid to redistribute it but then instead resell it for certain price, or simply stock pile to reinject back into the market in another region. Oh yeah and those clothes you 'donated' to help Africa? They are bought up then resold as well. There is just simply no mechanism in place to watch over how aid is distributed its all done on faith that it will be done ethically.

At the same time the agricultural market in the west is sustained perpetually via high subsidies from the government (see EU CAP policy and US Food Homeland Security Act), which also reflects in world agricultural trade (see WTO and agricultural trade petitions), effectively agricultural products from the west are dumped on the world market below cost of production undercutting any developing agricultural markets in the developing world.

This is of course rather unfair given that while only a small percentage of the West's economic activity resides in agricultural markets whereas its nearly 70% to 80% of the economic activity in developing nations since industrialization and services based industries depend on a developed agricultural market first.

There are other issues also, borders between African nations are most usually closed, there is a lack of infrastructure to allow free movement of such commodities between nations. The continent should be able to respond to member nations crisis, but that mechanism is not there, and reflexively asking for aid from the west usually also brings large paychecks and Mercedes cars to corrupt leaders in power. You know all the problems would be solved if we just kept throwing wads of cash at them without any accountability, you been to LiveAid? bought that crappy white band for Make Poverty History? Do you have any idea what happened to that money? I thought so...

If the west wanted to help the developing world in it's problems with regards to agriculture it would stop subsidization, stop depressing world food prices, help and developing a self sustaining agricultural market in Africa through education and good practices (scorch and burn is still a widely used agricultural practice in Africa). However this comes at the cost of upsetting farmers in the west, though that doesn't exist anymore, its usually large corporations holding huge tracts of land, lobbying the government (look at the powerless FDA) for protectionist trade policies (to benefit themselves not the consumer), producing at above cost sustained by subsidies from the government.

Yeah Greenpeace and other anti-GMO organizations are just fearmongering. They don't seem to get that almost *all* of our food is "genetically engineered"in one way or another. It used to be known as selective breeding and cross-polination!

However, there's no inherent conflict between organic food and also engineering and improving our food, and organic practices don't inherently have lower output than non-organic as well. In fact, over the long term, sustainable practices like organic farming produce more output, while nonorganic practices require increasing fertilizer inputs.

We need to combine improved species (could be GMO, could be simple selecting breeding) *and* sustainable agriculture practices (including so-called "organic" farming).